Day. Cal. 1. No more the rising sun shall gild the morn, The seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay, Births. Tiberius Drusus Claudius, A. Sacred Eclogue. Deaths. Marcus Ulpius Trajan, A. D. 117. d. Selinuns, in Cilicia. St. Eusebius, 371. Vercelli. killed, Maser-field.(Bardney.) Louis VI. (of France) 1137. Cosmo de Medici, the elder, 1464. Florence. Chemistry has its philoso-Oswald (of Northumbria), 642. pher's stone; geometry its quadrature of the circle; astronomy its longitude; mechanics its perpetual motion. Morality, too, is not without her chimeras; pure Laurence Valla, 1465? d. Rome. disinterestedness and perfect Sir Edmund Anderson, 1605. friendship, which none will ever Eyworth. arrive at, are of that kind. Fontenelle. Obits of the Latin Church. Sts. Faith, Hope, and Charity, St. Pellegrini (or Peregrinus) Degory Wheare, 1647. Oxford. Albinus, The Jesuits extend the creed, and abridge the decalogue.---Jaques Boileau. The sixth was August, being rich array'd Yet rode he not, but led a lovely Maid Forth by the lily hand, the which was crown'd With ears of corn, and full her hand was found; That was the righteous virgin, which of old Liv'd here on earth, and plenty made abound.---Spenser. Acts. CERES. The month of the Virgin' has always been considered this lady's place, or niche, in the temple of the year. She is identified with the Damater of Babylon, the Phoenician Astarte, the Isis of Egypt, the Charis of the Dorians, and the Persephone of the early Athenians, and is represented holding a sistrum, or lamp, and some ears of corn. An image of her sway and bounty was readily found in those countries between the tropics where the influence of the watery star' over the atmosphere and tides is most predominant. In other respects Ceres is simply a figure of the earth in her season of abundance, presiding over peace and virtue. Cicero in Verrem has linked her with the goddess Libera, and they are styled the fountains of life and nourishment, of laws and of manners, of good breeding and of kindness, the inseparable examples to social man. THE MONTHS. The Julian month, Augustus, corresponds with the twelfth and last month, Mesorë (according to Sanchoniatho, Misor was the father of Thoth, inventor of the first letters), in the modern Egyptian year; with the twelfth historical month, Elul, of the Jews; with the twelfth month, Affirar, of the Persians; with the twelfth months, Nahase, Massari, and Huetits, of the Ethiopians, Copts, and Armenians; with the twelfth months, Gorpiæus, Romeus, and Damatrius, of the SyroMacedonians, Paphians, and Bythinians; with the eleventh solar month, Ab, of the Syrians; with the third Attic moon, Boëdromion; the twelfth, Hyperberetaus, of the Macedonians, and the eighth, Lous, of their solar year; and with the second moons, Saphar and Sefer of the Arabic and Turkish calendars. It is called Oost (or harvest) month, by the Dutch and Germans; and was named, by the Anglo-Saxons, Arn, and Peod, afterwards Weod month, meaning the bonny earth is clothed or covered. Bacchus and fostering Ceres! powers divine! Who gave us corn for meat, for water, wine.---Georgicks. The meanest wretch, if Heav'n should give him line, Let winds and seas together rage and swell, This nature teaches, and becomes 'em well. Pride was not made for man: a conscious sense Of guilt and folly, and their consequence Destroys the claim; and to beholders tells, Here nothing but the shape of manhood dwells.---Waller. Acts. Equestrian games were celebrated in the Roman circus upon the calends of August, in honour of Mars, the day when his temple was consecrated. It was also the anniversary of the goddess Hope, in the herbmarket. The defection of the entire fleet of Marc Antony, at Alexandria, which suddenly passed over to Octavius Cæsar (Augustus) upon this day, B. C. 30.-See 29th August. Macrobius has favoured us with the following sentence: "It was in the month hitherto called Sextilis' that the Emperor Cæsar Augustus took possession of his first Consulship (B. C. 38); that he celebrated three triumphs [see 16th April]; that he received the oath of allegiance of the legions that occupied the Janiculum; that he reduced Egypt under the power of the Roman people; that he put an end to all civil wars: it appears that this month is, and has been, a most happy month to this empire; the Senate therefore ordains that this month shall henceforth be called AUGUSTUS." The Emperor added a day to August, which he took from February, making it (like the month of Julius, his uncle) to consist of thirty-one days; September and November were at the same time deprived, and the odd day of each affixed to the months October and December. Claudius, the sixth (after the wretch Caligula) of the twelve elephants, was born at Lyons, the same day that an altar was first dedicated there to Augustus, B. C. 11. The great Drusus Germanicus, his father, was the son of Livia Drusilla (whom her husband transferred as a treasure to Augustus, in her sixth month), and the brother of Tiberius. He died (fatorum iniquitas, rapuit, observes Paterculus) in his summer camp, beyond the Rhine, during his consulship and thirtieth year, B. C. 10. The death in his sixty-third year of the Emperor Trajan, who admired and copied the virtues of Nerva, his predecessor and father by adoption, A. D. 117. He reigned nineteen years, six months, and fifteen days, in the hearts of his people, when Hadrian received his mantle.--See 10th July. In things of consequence he sadly fails. ---Augustus on Claudius. Pensive Winter cheer'd by rough industry His harden'd fingers deck the gaudy Spring; Without him Summer were an arid waste; Nor to th' Autumnal months could thus transmit Those full, mature, immeasurable stores, That waving round, recall my wandering song.---Autumn. Acts. LAMMAS DAY. From ancient authorities we find that this was the usual nominal day of commencing harvest in England. By a useful act, called the 'Statute of Labourers,' 25th Edward III. in 1351, it is provided,' that no carter, ploughman, day [dairy-maid], or other servants, shall take in the time of sarcling [weeding] or hay-making, but a penny the day, and mowers of meadows for the acre fivepence, or by the day fivepence, and reapers of corn in the first week of August, twopence, and the second threepence, and so till the end of August; and less in the country, where less was wont to be given, without meat or drink or other courtesy; and that all workmen bring openly in their hands to the market towns their instruments, and these shall be hired in a common place and not privy. And that no servant go out of the town where he dwelleth in the winter to serve in the summer, if he can get service in the same town, taking as before is said; saving that the people of the counties of Stafford, Lancaster, and Derby, and people of Craven, and of the marches of Wales and Scotland, and other places, may come in time of August, and labour in other counties, and safely return, as they were wont to do before this time.' Bread-offerings of the first-fruits at the season of harvest were universal; and our Saxon holiday of Hlaf-mass, or Loaf-mass, expresses, although in shadow, the 'natural piety,' merely, of nations, called heathen, now extinguished. The Guild of August has lost its primitive importance by the reformation of the calendar; and, in a good sense, Lammas is no longer a division in the year, but beyond history, a very dull and dead, in short, on all hands, a cross quarter-day. The festival of "St. Peter's Chains," when the Latin church so named was consecrated. The old English tax, called Peter's-pence, was collected upon this day. It seems to have been here first laudably imposed in 725, by Ina, King of the West Saxons, for the support of an English College, at Rome, but afterwards appropriated by the church for very opposite purposes. He published a code of seventy-nine laws. Be not too narrow, husbandmen; but fling From the full sheaf the liberal handful.---Thomson. Artificial man extends with his sphere, but, alas! that sphere is microscopic. The reverse is the man of mind. When he walks along the river of Amazons; when he rests his eye on the unrivalled Andes; when he measures the long and watered Savannah; or contemplates, from a sudden promontory, the distant vast Pacific--and feels himself a freeman in this vast theatre, and commanding each ready produced fruit of this wilderness, and each progeny of this stream---his exaltation is not less than imperial. He is as gentle too as he is great. He becomes at once a child and a king. Gilbert. Acts. King John arrives before the castle of Mirabeau, near Poitiers, and relieves the queen-mother, Eleanor, besieged there by Prince Arthur, 1202. Not one knight of the Duke of Brittany's little army escaped death or a prison. Twenty-two noblemen were starved to death in England at Corfe Castle. Arthur himself was conducted to Falaise, and from thence to Rouen.-See 3d April. King Philip closed his campaign by a barbarous conflagration of the city of Tours. Simon de Montfort, son of the Earl of Leicester, and his followers, are surprised by the Prince Edward in their beds, before his Castle of Kenilworth, 1265. Several of the knights banneret, says the Scotch monk of Melrose, were caught flying without their breeches. Columbus first sets his football upon the Continent of the two Americas, the NEW WORLD, at the Point Arenal, Wednesday, 1498. It was that low tract of coast in the Caraccas, intersected by the numerous branches of the Orinoco. The Admiral, in a vein of enthusiasm, called it "Paradise," la tierra de gracia. Robert Ket, the tanner of Windham, but the lord of three manors, unfurls his standard of rebellion on the summit of Moushold Hill, near Norwich, at the head of twenty thousand men, erects for himself a throne sub tegmine quercús, which he termed 'the oak of reformation ;' and establishes, at his 'Castle' there, three courts of law, in imitation of those at Westminster, 1549. In the desperate battle of St. Martin's plain, the King's forces, under the Marquess of Northampton, were driven from the county; Lord Sheffield is despatched with a club, and the city this day was fired, 1549.-See 27th August. The Scottish parliament assembles, which adopting the petition of the chief lords of the congregation, entirely overturned the Roman church in Caledonia, and established in its place a new ecclesiastical system and discipline on a calvinistic and presbyterian model, 1560. I could plainly discover whence one family derives a long chin; why a second has abounded with knaves for two generations, and fools for two more; why a third happened to be crack-brained, and a fourth to be sharpers.---Gulliver. |
